For our jenkins jobs, we found that our internal artifactory repository is much faster than Bintray’s jcenter. Due to the large number of dependencies in the project, a project that takes 30 minutes downloading and building with jcenter only takes 3 minutes using an internal artifactory.

Since our internal repository is only available to us within our network, we don’t really want to expose those credentials in the project we eventually want to open source.

In this post, I will show you how we add an optional internal artifactory repository to our open source builds.

Spring Boot allows you to easily specify a tomcat version when using Maven (Docs). But there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent mechanism for Gradle.

To lock down a specific tomcat version for war deployment, I found that I had to exclude the starter-tomcat module and add the dependencies specified in the tomcat starter POM in my Spring Boot project’s build.gradle file.